Books discussed in this article:
WITNESS TO GENOICIDE
by Roy Gutman
180 pages, (out of print)
published by Macmillan

SEASONS IN HELL: UNDERSTANDING BOSNIA'S WAR
by Ed Vulliamy
370 pages, (out of print)
published by Simon and Schuster

THE TENTH CIRCLE OF HELL: A MEMOIR OF LIFE IN THE DEATH CAMPS OF BOSNIA
by Rezak Hukanovic and with a Foreword by Elie Wiesel
164 pages, $20.00 (hardcover)
published by New Republic/Basic Books

LATE-BREAKING FOREIGN POLICY: THE NEWS MEDIA'S INFLUENCE ON PEACE
OPERATIONS
by Warren P. Strobel
275 pages, $29.95 (hardcover), $14.95 (paperback)
published by United States Institute of Peace
THE SERBS: HISTORY, MYTH AND THE RESURRECTION OF YUGOSLAVIA
by Tim Judah
350 pages, $30.00 (hardcover)
published by Yale University Press

RAPE WARFARE: THE HIDDEN GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA-HERZOGOVINA AND CROATIA
by Beverly Allen
180 pages, $19.95 (hardcover)
published by University of Minnesota Press

THE BRIDGE BETRAYED: RELIGION AND GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA
By Michael A. Sells
244 pages, $19.95 (hardcover)
published by University of California Press

"Yugoslavia: 1989-1996"
By Warren Zimmermann, in US AND RUSSIAN POLICYMAKING WITH RESPECT
TO THE USE OF FORCE, edited by Jeremy R. Azrael, and Emil A. Pagin
217 pages, $15.00 (paperback)
published by Rand

THE CONCEIT OF INNOCENCE: LOSING THE CONSCIENCE OF THE WEST IN THE
WAR AGAINST BOSNIA
edited by Stjepan G. Mestrovic
259 pages, $34.95 (hardcover)
published by Texas A&M University Press

THIS TIME WE KNEW: WESTERN RESPONSES TO GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA
edited by Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic
412 pages, $18.95 (paperback)
published by New York University Press

GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA: THE POLICY OF ETHNIC CLEANSING
By Norman Cigar
247 pages, $29.95 (hardcover)
published by Texas A&M University Press

SLAUGHTERHOUSE: BOSNIA AND THE FAILURE OF THE WEST
By David Rieff
274 pages, $12.00 (paperback)
published by Touchstone

1.

To the hundreds of millions who first beheld them on their television
screens that August day in 1992, the faces staring out from behind barbed
wire seemed powerfully familiar.[1]
Sunken-cheeked, hollow-eyed, their skulls shaved, their bodies wasted
and frail, they did not seem men at all but living archetypes, their faces
stylized masks of tragedy. One had thought such faces consigned to the
century's horde of images—the emaciated figures of the 1940s shuffling
about in filthy striped uniforms, the bulldozers pushing into dark ditches
great masses of lank white bodies. Yet here, a mere half century later,
in 1992, came these gaunt beings, clinging to life in Omarska and Trnopolje
and the other camps run by Serbs in northern Bosnia, and now displayed
before the eyes of the world like fantastic, rediscovered beasts.

The Germans, creators of millions of such living dead, had christened
them Muselmänner—Musulmen, Muslims. At Auschwitz, wrote
Primo Levi,

the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone
of the camp, an anonymous mass...of non-men who march and labor in silence,
the divine spark dead in them.... One hesitates to call them living: one
hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no
fear, as they are too tired to understand.[2]

In Omarska as in Auschwitz the masters created these walking corpses from
healthy men by employing simple methods: withhold all but the barest nourishment,
forcing the prisoners' bodies to waste away; impose upon them a ceaseless
terror by subjecting them to unremitting physical cruelty; immerse them
in degradation and death and decay, destroying all hope and obliterating
the will to live.

"We won't waste our bullets on them," a guard at Omarska, which
the Serbs set up in a former open-pit iron mine, told a United Nations representative
in mid-1992. "They have no roof. There is sun and rain, cold nights,
and beatings two times a day. We give them no food and no water. They will
starve like animals."[3]

On August 5, 1992, Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian,
the first newspaperman admitted into Omarska, stood in the camp's "canteen"
and watched, stupefied, as thirty emaciated men stumbled out into the yard,
squinting at the sunlight:

...A group of prisoners...have just emerged from a door in the
side of a large rust-colored metal shed. [T]hey run in single file across
the courtyard.... Above them in an observation post is the watchful eye,
hidden behind reflective sunglasses, of a beefy guard who follows their
weary canter with the barrel of his heavy machine gun.

Their...heads [are] newly shaven, their clothes baggy over their
skeletal bodies. Some are barely able to move. In the canteen,... they
line up in obedient and submissive silence and collect...a meager, watery
portion of beans....

They are given precisely three minutes to run from the shed, wait for the
food and gulp it down, and run back to the shed. "Whoever didn't make
it would get beaten or killed," a prisoner identified only as Mirsad
told Helsinki Watch investigators. "The stew we were given was boiling
hot...so we all had 'inside burns.' The inside of my mouth was peeling."[4]

Vulliamy and his colleagues stand and gaze at the creatures struggling to
wolf down the rations:

...[T]he bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces
of jagged stone from the pencil-thin stalks to which their arms have been
reduced. Their skin is putrefied, the complexions...have corroded. [They]
are alive but decomposed, debased, degraded, and utterly subservient,
and yet they fix their huge hollow eyes on us with [what] looks like blades
of knives.

It is an extraordinary confrontation, this mutual stare: Vulliamy and
his colleagues are reporting from inside a working concentration camp.
All the while, though, Serb guards in combat fatigues, cradling AK-47s
and bearing great military knives sheathed at their hips, trudge heavily
about the room, their eyes glaring above their beards.

Vulliamy moves forward to speak to a "young man, emaciated, sunken-eyed
and attacking his watery bean stew like a famished dog, his spindly hands
shaking," but the fellow stops him: "I do not want to tell any
lies," he says, "but I cannot tell the truth." It is an
eloquent comment: most of these Muselmänner prove "too
terrified to talk, bowing their heads and excusing themselves by casting
a glance at the pacing soldiers, or else they just stare, opaque, spiritless,
and terrified."

The reporters ask to see the hospital and receive a curt refusal. Nor
may they look inside that white building—the White House, the prisoners
call it—or the great "rust-colored shed" from which the
men had come, squinting at the August sun.

Later, survivors describe the shed as "a vast human hen coop, in
which thousands of men were crammed for twenty-four hours a day..., living
in their own filth and, in many cases, dying from asphyxiation."
So tightly were prisoners packed together in the stifling, airless heat,
"Sakib R." tells Vulliamy, that lying down was impossible and
some lost consciousness standing up, collapsing one against another.

I [counted] seven hundred that I could actually see [around
me]. A lot of people went mad...: when they went insane, shuddering and
screaming, they were taken out and shot.

Though guards at Omarska and other camps shot
many prisoners, this was by no means the preferred method. If Auschwitz's
killing tended to be mechanized and bureaucratized, Omarska's was emotional
and personal, for it depended on the simple, intimate act of beating. "They
beat us with clubs, bats, hoses, rifle butts," one survivor told a
Helsinki Watch interviewer. "Their favorite was a thick rubber hose
with metal on both ends." They beat us, said another, "with braided
cable wires" and with pipes "filled with lead."

Next to the automatic rifle, next even to the knife (which was freely used
at Omarska), the club or the pipe is exhausting, time-consuming, inefficient.
Yet the guards made it productive. A female prisoner identified only as
"J" told Helsinki Watch investigators:

We saw corpses piled one on top of another.... The bodies eventually
were gathered with a forklift and put onto trucks—usually two large
trucks and a third, smaller truck. The trucks first would unload containers
of food, and then the bodies would be loaded [on].... This happened almost
every day—sometimes there [were]...twenty or thirty—but usually
there were more. Most of the deaths occurred as a result of beatings.[5]

One survivor interviewed by United Nations investigators estimated that
"on many occasions, twenty to forty prisoners were killed at night
by 'knife, hammer, and burning.' He stated that he had witnessed the killing
of one prisoner by seven guards who poured petrol on him, set him on fire,
and struck him upon the head with a hammer." All prisoners were beaten,
but according to the UN investigators, guards in all the camps meted out
especially savage treatment "to intellectuals, politicians, police,
and the wealthy."[6] When four guards summoned the president of the local Croatian Democratic Union, Silvije Saric, along with Professor Puskar from nearby Prijedor, for "interrogation," the female prisoner
testified,

I heard beating and yelling.... At times it sounded as if wood
were being shattered, but those were bones that were being broken.

...When they opened the door ..., they started yelling at us,
"Ustasa slut, see what we do to them!" ...I saw two piles of
blood and flesh in the corner. The two men were so horribly beaten that
they no longer had the form of human beings.[7]

Apart from obvious differences in scale and ambition, it is the Serbs'
reliance on this laborious kind of murder that most strikingly distinguishes
the workings of their camps from those of the German death factories.
At many of the latter, healthy arrivals would work as slaves until they
were reduced to being Muselmänner; death came when camp bureaucrats
judged them no longer fit to provide any useful service to the Reich.
The gas chambers—routinized, intentionally impersonal means of killing—had
evolved partly out of a concern for the effect that committing mass murder
would have on troops, even on men specially trained to do it. As Raul
Hilberg observed,

The Germans employed the phrase Seelenbelastung ("burdening
of the soul") with reference to machine-gun fire...directed at men,
women, and children in prepared ditches. After all, the men that were
firing these weapons were themselves fathers. How could they do this day
after day? It was then that the technicians developed a gas van designed
to lessen the suffering of the perpetrator.[8]

And even within the camps themselves, SS officers worried that violence
and sadism would demoralize and corrupt their elite troops. "The SS
leaders," Wolfgang Sofsky writes,

were indifferent to the suffering of the victims, but not to
the morale of their men. Their attention was aroused...by the sadistic
excesses of individual tormenters. As a countermeasure, camp brothels
were set up, and the task of punishment was delegated to specially
selected prisoners. The leadership also transferred certain thugs
whose behavior had become intolerable. [Emphasis added][9]

At Omarska such men would have been cherished; the out-and-out passion with
which a guard administered beatings and devised tortures could greatly bolster
his prestige. Acts of flamboyant violence, publicly performed, made of some
men celebrities of sadism. In his memoir The Tenth Circle of Hell,
Rezak Hukanovic—a Muslim who was a journalist in Prijedor before he
was taken to Omarska—describes how guards responded when a prisoner
rejected the order to strip and stood immobile amid the cowering naked inmates:

The guard...fired several shots in the air. The man stood stubbornly
in place without making the slightest movement. While bluish smoke still
rose from the rifle barrel, the guard struck the clothed man in the middle
of the head with the rifle butt, once and then again, until the man fell.
Then the guard...moved his hand to his belt. A knife flashed in his hand,
a long army knife.

He bent down, grabbing hold of the poor guy's hair.... Another
guard joined in, continuously cursing. He, too, had a flashing knife in
his hand.... The guards [used] them to tear away the man's clothes. After
only a few seconds, they stood up, their own clothes covered with blood....

...The poor man stood up a little, or rather tried to, letting
out excruciating screams. He was covered with blood. One guard took a
water hose from a nearby hydrant and directed a strong jet at [him]. A
mixture of blood and water flowed down his...gaunt, naked body as he bent
down repeatedly, like a wounded Cyclops...; his cries were of someone
driven to insanity by pain. And then Djemo and everyone else saw clearly
what had happened: the guards had cut off the man's sexual organ and half
of his behind.

Hukanovic's memoir (in which he writes about
himself in the third person as Djemo) and the testimony of other former
prisoners overflow with such horror. Reading them, one feels enervated,
and also bewildered: What accounts for such unquenchable blood-lust? This
is a large subject, to which I shall return; but part of the answer may
have to do with the elaborate ideology that stands behind Serb objectives
in the war. In order to achieve a "Greater Serbia," which will
at last bring together all Serbs in one land, they feel they must "cleanse"
what is "their" land of outsiders. Founding—or rather reestablishing—"Greater
Serbia" is critical not only because it satisfies an ancient historical
claim but because Serbs must protect themselves from the "genocide"
others even now are planning for them.

In this thinking, such genocide has already begun—in Croatia, in Kosovo,
in Bosnia itself: anywhere Serbs live but lack political dominance. As many
writers, including Michael Sells and, especially, Tim Judah, point out,
such ideas of vulnerability and betrayal can be traced far back in Serbia's
past, and President Slobodan Milosevic, with his control of state radio
and television, exploited them brilliantly, building popular hatred by instilling
in Serbs a visceral fear and paranoia.

Administering a beating is a deeply personal affirmation of power: with
your own hands you seize your enemy—supposedly a mortally threatening
enemy, now rendered passive and powerless—and slowly, methodically
reduce him from human to nonhuman. Each night at Omarska and other camps
guards called prisoners out by name and enacted this atrocity. Some of their
enemies they beat to death, dumping their corpses on the tarmac for the
forklift driver to find the next morning. Others they beat until the victim
still barely clung to life; if he did not die, the guards would wait a week
or so and beat him again.

For the Serbs it was a repeated exercise in triumph, in satisfying and vanquishing
an accumulated paranoia. As Hukanovic makes clear in his account of the
first time his name was called out, this torture is exceedingly, undeniably
intimate—not simply because force is administered by hand but also
because it comes very often from someone you know:

"In front of me," the [bearded, red-faced] guard ordered,
pointing to the White House.... He ranted and raved, cursing and occasionally
pounding Djemo on the back with his truncheon....

...The next second, something heavy was let loose from above,
from the sky, and knocked Djemo over the head. He fell.

...Half conscious, sensing that he had to fight to survive,
he wiped the blood from his eyes and forehead and raised his head. He
saw four creatures, completely drunk, like a pack of starving wolves,
with clubs in their hands and unadorned hatred in their eyes. Among them
was the frenzied leader, Zoran Zigic, the infamous Ziga.... He was said
to have killed over two hundred people, including many children, in the
"cleansing" operations around Prijedor.... Scrawny and long-legged,
with a big black scar on his face, Ziga seemed like an ancient devil come
to visit a time as cruel as his own....

"Now then, let me show you how Ziga does it," he said,
ordering Djemo to kneel down in the corner by the radiator, "on all
fours, just like a dog." The maniac grinned. Djemo knelt down and
leaned forward on his hands, feeling humiliated and as helpless as a newborn....

Ziga began hitting Hukanovic on his back and head with a club that had a
metal ball on the end. Hukanovic curled up trying to protect his head. Zigic
kept hitting him, steadily, methodically, cursing all the while.

The drops of blood on the tiles under Djemo's head [became]
denser and denser until they formed a thick, dark red puddle. Ziga kept
at it; he stopped only every now and then...to fan himself, waving his
shirt tail in front of his contorted face.

At some point a man in fatigues appeared.... It was Saponja,
a member of the famous Bosna-montaza soccer club from Prijedor; Djemo
had once known him quite well.... "Well, well, my old pal Djemo.
While I was fighting..., you were pouring down the cold ones in Prijedor."
He kicked Djemo right in the face with his combat boot. Then he kicked
him again in the chest, so badly that Djemo felt like his ribs had been
shattered...Ziga laughed like a maniac...and started hitting Djemo again
with his weird club....

Djemo received another, even stronger kick to the face. He clutched
himself in pain, bent a little to one side, and collapsed, his head sinking
into the now-sizable pool of

Then Ziga and the other guards forced Djemo to smear his bloody face in
a filthy puddle of water.

..."The boys have been eating strawberries and got themselves
a little red," said Ziga, laughing like a madman.... Another prisoner,
Slavko Ecimovic,...was kneeling, all curled up, by the radiator. When
he lifted his head, where his face should have been was nothing but the
bloody, spongy tissue under the skin that had just been ripped off.

Instead of eyes, two hollow sockets were filled with black,
coagulated blood. "You'll all end up like this, you and your families,"
Ziga said. "We killed his father and mother. And his wife. We'll
get his kids. And yours, we'll kill you all." And with a wide swing
of his leg, he kicked Djemo right in the face....

2.

Confronted by the televised faces behind barbed wire, Bush administration
officials reacted instinctively: they denied knowing anything about the
camps. Or rather, they first said they knew and then, next day, said they
didn't.

On August 3, 1992, the day after Roy Gutman's first, highly graphic story
on Omarska appeared in Newsday, the State Department deputy spokesman,
Richard Boucher, faced reporters and announced that administration officials
had not only been aware "that the Serbian forces are maintaining
what they call detention centers" but that "abuses and torture
and killings [were] taking place." Angry questions followed: If President
Bush had known of these camps, why had he not publicly denounced them?
Why had he not insisted the prisoners be released, or that the camps open
their doors to the Red Cross? Why, finally, had he not at least revealed
that the camps existed?

The next morning Thomas Niles, assistant secretary of state for European
affairs, took his seat before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and
told congressmen that "we don't have, thus far, substantiated information
that would confirm the existence of these camps." Less than twenty-four
hours before, Bush officials said they had known of the horrors at Omarska;
now they were unable to say the camps existed.

Why this high-level Keystone Kops routine, particularly from an administration
that prided itself on its cool, professional management of foreign affairs?
The answer is not far to seek. The reporters' discovery of Omarska and the
other camps, and the outrage their dispatches and videotape provoked, did
not pose, for Bush, a problem of foreign policy at all but rather one of
politics. For though Secretary of State James Baker had claimed that the
administration did not act forcefully in the Balkans because "the American
people would never...support it," the matter was not so simple: as
Baker well knew, polls could fluctuate wildly. At various times during the
Bosnia conflict, lurid television pictures provoked "spikes" in
the fever chart of popular concern, and, if Americans still wouldn't support
dispatching ground troops, they were not shy about demanding their government
do something. The Bush people, having concluded nearly two years
before that taking strong action posed unacceptable risks,[10] now feared that popular outrage, momentarily
fueled by just this sort of "telegenic" but (in their view) ephemeral
atrocity, might drag them toward such involvement—or else, popular
sentiment would penalize them politically (with the election barely three
months away) for "doing nothing."

State Department officials, who approved Boucher's original announcement
that the government had known of the camps, had wildly misjudged the response.
In declaring that they had known, an unnamed official told Warren P. Strobel,
author of Late-Breaking Foreign Policy, the intent had been "to
move the ball forward one step, and the [news] reports moved it forward
two steps." Two steps was clearly too much; so Niles was ordered up
to Congress to try to move the ball back one, an absurd notion under the
circumstances. "We kind of waffled around a little bit," acknowledged
Lawrence Eagleburger, then acting secretary of state, in an interview with
Strobel. "All of us were being a little bit careful...because of this
issue of whether or not it was going to push us into something that we thought
was dangerous."

The pictures from the camps thus confronted Bush officials with the challenge
not of how to deal with the reemergence of concentration camps in Europe
but rather how to withstand the political pressures arising from the televised
images of them. Concentration camps a half-century after the Nazis would
have been bad enough, but pictures of the emaciated, tortured prisoners:
this was the sort of thing that stirred the lethargic and fickle American
public.

On August 6, the day pictures of the emaciated
prisoners taken by ITN British television were broadcast in the US and around
the world, President Bush finally called for international observers to
be granted access to the camps and, for good measure, he asked that the
United Nations authorize that "all necessary means" be used to
deliver humanitarian supplies to Bosnia. Even as the President, faced with
pictures of men in concentration camps, talked of the UN and food shipments,
Governor Clinton, now the Democratic presidential candidate, was demanding
that the administration push NATO to send fighter bombers to save Bosnians
from "deliberate and systematic extermination based on their ethnic
origin." The next day, facing a barrage of questions at Kennebunkport,
Bush proved defiant:

I don't care what the political pressures are. Before one soldier...is
committed to battle, I'm going to know how that person gets out of there.
And we are not going to get bogged down into some guerrilla warfare. We
lived through that once.

As Eagleburger later put it, "Vietnam never goes away,"11 and obviously this was dramatically
the case for George Bush. The President plainly felt that any American
involvement in Bosnia, even a limited one to eliminate concentration camps,
must inevitably lead to "a quagmire."

Thus, according to former Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann, when
the possibility of an "air operation" to rescue victims of the
camps was raised within the embattled administration that August, and Baker
and the adviser for national security affairs, Brent Scowcroft, showed serious
interest in it, "there was no sign... that the President ever did,
and nothing was done." Indeed, as Zimmermann tells it, when officials
discussed any change in Bush's passive policy the ghost of Vietnam
could be felt hovering in the room:

The "lesson" drawn from Vietnam was that even a minimum
injection of American forces could swell inexorably into a major commitment
and produce a quagmire. The second objection...was the view that had prevailed
during the successful prosecution of the Gulf War: there should be no
US military intervention unless the objectives were clear, the means applied
to [them] would bring certain victory, there was an "exit strategy"
(the earlier the better).... Pervading all these reasons was an almost
obsessive fear of American casualties...[12]

In effect, requiring that the "means applied" always "bring
certain victory" would likely preclude even minimal intervention. As
Arnold Kanter, a former high Bush administration official, says flatly,
Pentagon officers "clearly understand that if intervention options
entail very large force requirements, it often has the practical political
effect of virtually ruling out military intervention."

As George Bush, "the foreign policy President," knew, and as Bill
Clinton would soon discover, such an ideology, taken as faith by a Vietnam-haunted
officer corps, severely limits a president's freedom of diplomatic action.
If the State Department "tends to be more willing...to threaten, deploy,
and employ military forces," Kanter says, this is because diplomats
view "the threat and use of force as a key instrument of US foreign
policy...."[13]

In late September, as the debate set off by
the concentration camp pictures raged, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General
Colin Powell summoned to his office a New York Times reporter and
gave a remarkable interview, which the Times ran on its front page
under the headline "Powell Delivers a Resounding No On Using Limited
Force In Bosnia." Powell declared:

As soon as [politicians] tell me it is limited, it means they
do not care whether you achieve a result or not. As soon as they tell
me "surgical," I head for the bunker.

Insisting he did not believe the military must apply "overwhelming
force in every situation," the general said leaders must "begin
with a clear understanding of what political objective is being achieved,"
then determine whether the objective is "to win or do something else."

Preferably, it is to win because it shows you have made a commitment
to decisive results.... The key is to get decisive results to accomplish
the mission.[14]

The simplicity is deceptive: for Powell the opposite of
"to win" is not "to lose" but rather to fail to achieve
"decisive results." If a military action does not prove "decisive,"
it has failed. And if a proposed mission cannot be virtually guaranteed
to produce such results, it should not be attempted.

One might think the responsibility for determining what such "results"
should be would properly fall not to Powell but "above his pay grade."
If the president, having decided that he could define success as something
less than what military officers deem to be "decisive results,"
chooses to employ "limited force" to strike, say, the rail lines
or roads leading to Omarska—or to destroy the Drina River bridges
in order to cripple the Bosnian Serb supply system—then this decision
belongs to him, not to senior officers.

And so it comes as no surprise that the State Department spokesman's first
response to the faces from Omarska had been the forthright one. Of course
the American government had known about the Serbian camps, long before
the pictures and stories had come out. The only question was exactly when.
As John Fox, an official in the State Department's policy planning office,
told ABC News, "The US government had in its possession credible
and verified reports of the existence of the camps, Serbian-run camps
in Bosnia and elsewhere, as of June, certainly July, 1992, well ahead
of media revelations."[15]
To the public, Bush officials had said nothing of the torture and the
killing; for the outrage that would greet such news was predictable. And
the administration, now as before, was determined to do nothing at all.

As it happened, though, the public revelations of the camps in August
1992, and the political controversy that followed, were mirrored within
the government by a quieter struggle: over the meanings, and implications,
of genocide.

3.

In early April 1992, little more than a week after officers of the newly
christened Bosnian Serb Army launched their campaign of limited conquest
in Bosnia, officials in Washington began receiving reports of atrocities,
among them mass executions, beatings, mutilations, and rape. Jon Western,
at the State Department, then working on human rights in Bosnia, recalls
that

many of these atrocities looked an awful lot like what we had
heard and read about during World War II—the Balkans historically
produce a lot of disinformation—and we were trained to look at them
critically and decipher what was real. But as reports continued to come
in..., it became apparent that they weren't just propaganda.

In fact, we were getting reports from a number of sources: eyewitnesses
who had been incarcerated in concentration camps begin filtering out in
summer 1992 and began giving accounts of atrocities that we could cross-reference
with those from other eyewitnesses....[16]

As the Serbs prosecuted their "lightning campaign"—the Bosnian
Serb Army of eighty thousand men, which had come fully equipped from the
Yugoslav National Army, conquered 60 percent of Bosnian territory in scarcely
six weeks—State Department officials compiled testimony of increasingly
shocking and gruesome atrocities. Jon Western recalls that children were
"systematically raped":

There was one account that affected me: a young girl was raped
repeatedly by Serb paramilitary units. Her parents were restrained behind
a fence and she was raped repeatedly and they left her in a pool of blood
and over the course of a couple of days she finally died, and her parents
were not able to tend to her; they were restrained behind a fence. When
we first heard this story, it seemed very hard to believe but we heard
it from a number of eyewitnesses ...and it became apparent there was validity
to it.

Western and his colleagues were struck not only by the cruelty of these
abuses but by their systematic nature; they very rapidly came to
understand that though the Serb soldiers and, especially, the "paramilitary"
troops responsible for "mopping up" were committing wildly sadistic
acts of brutality, often under the influence of alcohol, their officers
were making rational, systematic use of terror as a method of war. Rather
than being a regrettable but unavoidable concomitant of combat, rapes and
mass executions and mutilations here served as an essential part of it.

The Serbs fought not only to conquer territory but to "clear"
it of all traces of their Muslim or Croat enemies; or, as the notorious
Serb phrase has it, to "ethnically cleanse" what they believed
to be "their" land. Of course making use of terror in such a way
is probably as old—and as widespread—as warfare itself:

Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent
populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage
and brutality of every kind—such were the means which were employed
by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation
of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.

This account is drawn from the Carnegie Endowment's Report of the International
Commission to Inquire into the Cause and Conduct of the Balkan Wars,
published in 1914.[17] Substitute the word "Muslims"
for "Albanians" and the sentence could have been composed in spring
or summer of 1992. Not only was the technique of "ethnic cleansing"
identical, its purpose—"the entire transformation of the ethnic
character of regions"—was clear to all.

The motive force driving Serbs to fight to
achieve a "Greater Serbia"—or "all Serbs in one country"—depends
however on a fortuitous conjunction of factors: a set of powerful historical
legends combined in a cherished nationalist myth; the advent of economic
hardship and the uncertainty brought on by the end of the cold war; and
the rise of an ambitious, talented, and ruthless politician.

On the nationalist myth in particular Tim Judah writes splendidly, briefly
describing the Battle of Kosovo of 1389, and discussing its transformation
into the founding epic of the Serbian "exile." The story he tells
does much to explain both the Serb obsession with the treachery of outsiders
and their quasi-religious faith in the eventual founding, or rather reestablishment,
of the Serbian state.

It was at Kosovo that King Lazar and his Serb knights rode boldly out to
take the field against the Turks under Sultan Murad and defend Europe against
the infidel. The Serbs lost this battle—although, as Judah shows, the
evidence for this is ambiguous, as it is for much of the story; they later
came to blame the defeat on the (probably imaginary) treachery of Vuk Brankovic,
one of Lazar's favorite knights. As Petar Petrovic-Njegos, prince-bishop
of Montenegro, wrote in his 1847 epic The Mountain Wreath:

Our Serbia chiefs, most miserable cowards,The Serbian stock did heinously betray.Thou, Brankovic, of stock despicable,Should one serve so his fatherland,Thus much is honesty esteem'd.

Judah argues that the "myth of treachery was needed as a way to explain
the fall of the medieval state, and it has powerful seeds of self-replications
contained within it," which have sprouted into an obsession with betrayal.
(During the 1991-1995 war, Judah notes, with "monotonous regularity
losses were always put down to secret deals—and treachery.")

In the last supper the night before the battle, Brankovic plays Judas to
Lazar's Christ; in causing the Serbs to lose the battle, and thus their
country, to the Turks, Brankovic's betrayal made way for the crucifixion
of the Serb homeland itself. But, as Judah writes, Lazar's "idea that
it is better to fight honourably and die than to live as slaves" not
only "provided for Serbs an explanation for their oppression by the
Ottomans,"

it also identified the whole nation with the central guiding
raison d'íªtre of Christianity: resurrection. In other words
Lazar opted for the empire of heaven, that is to say truth and justice,
so that the state would one day be resurrected. An earthly kingdom was
rejected in favor of nobler ideals—victimhood and sacrifice—and
this choice is to be compared with the temptations of Christ.

As Jesus would be resurrected so Lazar would be: and so, as well, would
Serbia. This becomes a holy certainty, premised on the Serbs' heroism and
their sacrifice in losing to the Turks. "That is what people mean when
they talk about the Serbs as a 'heavenly people,'" Zarko Korac, a psychology
professor at Belgrade University, tells Judah.

In this way the Serbs identify themselves with the Jews. As
victims, yes, but also with the idea of "sacred soil." The Jews
said "Next year in Jerusalem" and after 2000 years they recreated
their state. The message is: "We are victims, but we are going to
survive."

Milosevic himself exploits this powerful ideological
view of history—Professor Korac believes that for most Serbs "it
is not a metaphor, it is primordial"—as a motivating force; but
he has not let it limit his own tactical flexibility. Judah rightly emphasizes
that Milosevic plainly did not always believe armed conquest and ethnic
cleansing central to carrying out his project in Bosnia, for example. Well
before the Bosnians declared independence and war broke out in the spring
of 1992, Milosevic tried hard to woo Bosnia into remaining in what was left
of the Federation—which, of course, Slovenia and Croatia having seceded
(and the Serbs of the Krajina now "liberated" from Croatia and
loosely tied to Serbia), was now politically dominated by the Serbs.

The Bosnians referred to Milosevic's planned state derisively as "Serboslavia"
and it is no wonder they wanted no part of it; but the Serb leader's tenacious
attempts to persuade the Bosnians not to follow the Slovenians and Croatians
in seceding show him to be much more a ruthless political tactician than
an ideologue, a distinction he would confirm by his behavior four years
later when he abandoned to the "ethnic cleansing" of the Croatian
army the very Krajina Serbs his National Army made such a show of "liberating"
in 1991.

In the event, though, and not surprisingly, Bosnia would not be wooed. Although
its inexperienced leader, Alija Itzetbegovic, understood the danger of declaring
independence—his nascent state, a third of whose people were Serb,
might instantly collapse in war—his desperate proposals (offered jointly
with the Macedonian president) to make of Yugoslavia a loose confederation
were hardly of interest to Serbia, Croatia, or Slovenia. Slovenia, a small,
prosperous republic with few Serbs and therefore of no real importance to
Milosevic, was determined to secede, and once the Slovenes departed, the
Croats were bound to follow (in fact, both republics seceded from Yugoslavia
on June 25, 1991).

This left the Bosnians with a stark choice: either passively sink into a
reconfigured Yugoslavia dominated by Milosevic and the Serbs, or declare
independence and pray that the world would recognize the new country and
somehow protect it from the onslaught to come. Itzetbegovic chose the latter,
imploring the "international community" to recognize his new country
and to send United Nations monitors to patrol its territory and prevent
the war he knew would come. After a referendum on independence was duly
held in February 1992 (which the Bosnian Serbs boycotted), the "international
community" in early April recognized Bosnia as a sovereign state, and
gave it a seat at the United Nations. But sending troops to protect the
new state, even lightly armed "monitors," was a different matter.
According to John Fox, a regional official on the State Department's Policy
Planning Staff at the time,

The French came to the [Bush] administration at very senior
levels...once in the early phase of Belgrade's attack on Croatia, and
at least once well before the military campaign against Bosnia, and they
made a proposal to join with the United States, and other willing states,
to put preventive peace-keepers on the ground across Bosnia—to support
the legitimate elected government of Bosnia, to stabilize and prevent
the outbreak of conflict, and to see Bosnia through that transition process
to becoming a new independent state.[18]

One might consider the proposal to dispatch peacekeeping troops as either
a relatively inexpensive way to prevent what seemed an inevitable and possibly
horrendous war, or as a risky initiative that would involve Americans in
a situation that didn't have a clear "exit strategy." In any case,
Fox says, "the French never got a very clear answer." His office,
the Policy Planning Staff, had proposed that the Americans join the French;
but "that proposal was not accepted."

Itzetbegovic would be given no "peacekeepers"; but after
all he had international recognition. The Serbs were not impressed. "Milosevic
couldn't care less if Bosnia was recognized," a laughing Dr. Karadzic
later told a television interviewer. "He said, 'Caligula proclaimed
his horse a senator but the horse never took his seat. Itzetbegovic may
get recognition but he'll never have a state.'" Karadzic, the self-proclaimed
leader of the Bosnian Serbs, now declared, in a famous speech during the
waning days of the integral Bosnian parliament in Sarajevo, "I warn
you, you'll drag Bosnia down to hell. You Muslims aren't ready for war—you'll
face extinction."[19]

He was right. By the time Cyrus Vance, the United Nations negotiator, concluded
the ceasefire in Croatia on January 2, 1992, thousands of Serb troops were
heading for Bosnia in their tanks and armored personnel carriers. On May
5, all soldiers and officers of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) who came
from Bosnia were taken out of the main force, complete with their equipment,
and officially became a "Bosnian Serb Army" of more than eighty
thousand fully trained men. Over the objections of the Bosnian government
in Sarajevo, the Serb forces took up strategic positions around the country,
clearly preparing for war. Jerko Doko, then Bosnia's minister of defense,
explained in testimony at The Hague that

this could be seen by the deployment of units; the control of
roads by the JNA; the relocation of artillery on hill tops around all
the major cities of Bosnia-Herzegovina; their collaboration with extremist
forces of the [Bosnian Serbian Democratic Party], arming them and assisting
the arming of them.

But Belgrade retained control. "We promised to pay all their costs,"
said Borislav Jovic, then a close aide of Milosevic's. It was not, he
said, as if the Bosnian Serbs had their own state budget to draw on. "They
couldn't even pay their officers." Doko remembers the National Army
commander, General Blagoje Adzic, visiting troops near Banja Luka and
Tuzla toward the end of March 1992 in order to check their preparedness
for the coming combat operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

As for the Bosnians, they were, as Karadzic said, unprepared for war.
"Before the fighting," David Rieff writes in Slaughterhouse,
"Alija Itzetbegovic insisted there could be no war because one side—his
own—would not fight. To have imagined that carnage could have been
averted for this reason was only one of the many culpably naive assumptions
the Bosnian presidency made."

The Serb leaders, on the other hand, could
not have been more prepared. During the last few years a group of selected
senior officers had secretly developed a military strategy to guide the
"Bosnia Serb Army" in its campaign to seize control of most
of Bosnia. The objectives were in turn based on ideological claims of
Serb vulnerability, Serb suffering, and Serb destiny that virtually every
Serb who read a newspaper, listened to the radio, or watched television
would by now know by heart.

The center of the ideology remained, as it had for six centuries, the
redemption of the defeat at Kosovo. In 1889, on the 500th anniversary
of the battle, Serbia's foreign minister declared that the Serbs had "continued
the battle in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when
they tried to recover their freedom through countless uprisings."
As Judah notes, Milosevic himself would make use of this occasion a century
later to invoke "Lazar's ghost" to come to the Serbs' aid.

4.

By this time, Milosevic was making use of an ideological program, drawn
up by Serbian intellectuals, that came to be called "the Memorandum,"
a kind of quasi-sociological rendition of the Lazar legend. In September
1986, extracts from this document, which was drafted by sixteen eminent
economists, scientists, and historians in the Serbian Academy of Arts
and Sciences at the suggestion of the prominent novelist and nationalist
Dobrica Cosic, had been leaked to the Belgrade press, and (in Judah's
phrase) shook "the whole of Yugoslavia" with "a political
earthquake."

In the key section entitled "Position of Serbia and the Serbian People,"
the writers launch a vigorous, bitter attack on what they call the "Weak
Serbia, strong Yugoslavia" policy implicit in the "injustices"
of Tito's 1974 constitution (which in effect "divided Serbia in three,"
by making Vojvodina and Kosovo autonomous provinces; though on Serbia's
territory, they both retained a right to vote in national government institutions).

The Serb exodus from the province of Kosovo—which, as Judah shows,
has amounted only to a relative decrease of population with respect
to the Albanians—the writers repeatedly describe as "the genocide
in Kosovo." The shift in population in Kosovo—which results
from "a physical, moral and psychological reign of terror"—together
with the economic and legal "hardships" all Serbs suffer daily,
"are not only threatening the Serbian people but also the stability
of Yugoslavia as a whole."

In the Federation's "general process of disintegration," the
academicians wrote, the Serbs "have been hit hardest" and in
fact the country's difficulties are "directed towards the total breaking
up of the national unity among the Serbian people." Observing that
24 percent of all Serbs live outside the Serbian Republic and more than
40 percent outside of so-called "inner Serbia," the writers
declare:

A nation which after a long and bloody struggle regained its own state,
which fought for and achieved a civil democracy, and which in the last
two wars lost 2.5 million of its members, has lived to see the day when
a Party committee of apparatchiks decrees that...it alone is not allowed
to have its own state. A worse historical defeat in peacetime cannot be
imagined.[20]

The roots of Milosevic's, and Karadzic's, ideological campaigns are all
here: the near-hysterical sense of historical grievance and betrayal, the
resentment over Serbia's "inferior political position," the heightened
rhetoric about the "genocide" of the Serbs—a term used to
describe the exile of Serbs from their rightful lands but that evokes darker
suspicions of the true intentions of Serbia's betrayers.

To combat these injustices Serbs are obliged to seize their fate in their
own hands and achieve the long-awaited resurrection of King Lazar: "the
territorial unity of the Serbian people." They must act not only to
ensure their survival but to lay claim at last to an ancient birthright:
"the establishment," the Memorandum says, "of the full national
integrity of the Serbian people, regardless of which republic or province
it inhabits, is its historic and democratic right." (Emphasis added)

Dominating the newspapers, television, and
radio from the late Eighties onward, Milosevic and the other purveyors of
this ideology brilliantly exploited the insecurities and fears of a people
caught in a maelstrom of economic decline and political change. In the Serbian
press all Muslims became "Islamic fundamentalists," all Croats
"Ustase." As Norman Cigar writes in a chapter of his Genocide
in Bosnia entitled "Paving the Way to Genocide," well before
the actual breakup of Yugoslavia, "influential figures in Serbia had
begun to shape a stereotypical image of Muslims as alien, inferior and a
threat to all that the Serbs held dear."

Such propaganda, fed incessantly to a people who in many cases had been
prepared for it by their own cherished historical myths, served to transform
neighbors into "the other"—outsiders, aliens. And Milosevic
did not find it difficult, in the bewildering world of nascent popular politics,
to portray a relatively new phenomenon for Yugoslavs—the legitimate
political opponent—as a mortal threat. By "isolating the entire
Muslim community," writes Cigar, such propaganda would ensure that
"any steps...taken against Muslims in pursuit of Belgrade's political
goals would acquire legitimacy and popular support."

Such "steps" were even then being prepared. During the late 1980s
a small group of officers (among them, then Colonel Ratko Mladic) who called
themselves the "military line" had begun meeting secretly with
members of Serbia's secret police.

By 1990, or perhaps a bit earlier—the timing here is a matter of controversy—the
officers had drafted what they called the "RAM plan" which set
out schemes for the military conquest of "Serb lands" in Croatia
and Bosnia. The plan was called RAM, or "FRAME"—it is not
known what the individual letters stand for—because it makes clear
the boundaries, or frame, within which the new Serbian-dominated lands will
be established. As Jerko Doko, the former Bosnian minister of defense, describes
it in his Hague testimony:

The substance of the plan was to create a greater Serbia. That
RAM was to follow the lines of Virovitica, Karlovac, Karlobag, which we
saw confirmed in reality later on with the decision on the withdrawal
of the JNA, the Yugoslav People's Army, from Slovenia and partly from
Croatia to those positions.[21]

In their plan, the officers described how artillery, ammunition, and other
military equipment would be stored in strategic locations in Croatia and
then in Bosnia, and how, with the help of the Secret Police, local Serbian
activists would be armed and trained, thereby creating "shadow"
police forces and paramilitary units in the towns of the Croatian Krajina
and throughout Bosnia. And, as early as July 1990, this is precisely what
the Army began to do. In the area of Foca, according to Doko,

The JNA had distributed among the Serb voluntary units about
51,000 pieces of firearms and [among] SDS members, about 23,000..., [the
Army] also gave them armoured vehicles, about 400 heavy artillery pieces,
800 mortars....

The leaders of the Bosnian Serb Army would be able to depend upon this "parallel
power structure" of dedicated, often fanatical, and now well-armed
men to support their troops as they carried out their campaign to conquer
Bosnia. For "to conquer" here does not mean simply to subdue.
In Bosnia people of different religions tended to be well mixed together;
many cities in the Drina Valley, for example, adjacent to the border of
Serbia itself, contained large numbers of Muslims.

The officers confronted, then, both a demographic and a strategic challenge.
They must create a new state whose contiguous territory bordered the Serbian
motherland—and which held most of the "liberated" Serbs.
"The fact that Muslims are the majority," Karadzic said, "makes
no difference. They won't decide our fate. That is our right." Serb
lands were Serb lands, regardless of who happened to live there.

And thus came into use "ethnic cleansing,"
an ancient and brutally effective technique of war christened by the Serbs
with a modern, hygienic name. In city after city, town after town, in the
spring and summer of 1992, the Bosnian Serb Army and its commandos and paramilitary
units launched their attacks in precisely the same pattern. It was clear
these operations of conquest and cleansing were minutely, and centrally,
planned. According to Vladimir Srebov, a former Serbian Democratic Party
leader who read the "RAM Plan," the officers stipulated a vast
program of ethnic cleansing the aim of which "was to destroy Bosnia
economically and completely exterminate the Muslim people." As Srebov
later told an interviewer:

The plan...envisaged a division of Bosnia into two spheres of
interest, leading to the creation of a Greater Serbia and a Greater Croatia.
The Muslims were to be subjected to a final solution: more than 50 percent
of them were to be killed, a smaller part was to be converted to Orthodoxy,
while an even smaller...part—people with money—were to be allowed
to buy their lives and leave, probably, through Serbia, for Turkey. The
aim was to cleanse Bosnia-Herzegovina completely of the Muslim nation.[22]

This plan was not fully accomplished, although it is astonishing to think
that it might have been. With some exceptions, when the Serbs launched their
campaign on March 27, 1992, they chose as their first objective to seize
those parts of Bosnia closest to Serbia and to the (now Serbian-controlled)
Krajina, regardless of who lived there. Within six weeks they controlled
60 percent of the country, and though they would later increase their gains,
occupying, at their strongest, some 70 percent of Bosnia's territory—Serbs
made up slightly less than a third of Bosnians—and though the fighting
and shelling and skirmishing would go on, the front lines would not change
dramatically during the next three years of the war.

When the Serb gunners began shelling cities and towns in Bosnia, the pattern
of "cleansing" emerged immediately. Army units would form a perimeter
around a town, setting up roadblocks. Messages were sent inviting all Serb
residents to depart. Then the artillerymen would begin their work, shelling
the town with heavy and light guns; if defenders fired back, the Serb bombardment
might last many days, destroying the town and killing most of those in it;
if there was no resistance, the heavy guns might stop in a day or two. Once
the town was considered sufficiently "softened up," the paramilitary
shock troops would storm in, and the terror would begin.

Like the camp guards—whom they visited
when they could in order to take part in torturing prisoners—the paramilitary
troops had one responsibility: to administer terror. After a town had been
subdued by artillery fire the paramilitaries "mopped up." Many
bore on their person all the iconography of World War II "Chetnik"
nationalists: bandoliers across their chests and huge combat knives on their
belts; fur hats with symbols of skull and crossbones; black flags, also
with skull and crossbones; and the full beard, which, as Ivo Banac says,
"in the peasant culture of Serbia is a sign of mourning; somebody dies,
one does not shave. This was something that happened in times of war...."[23]

Often the paramilitary troops would arrive at a newly conquered town with
lists of influential residents who were to be executed; just as often they
simply shot, or stabbed, or mutilated, or raped any resident whom they managed
to find. These killers, many of whom were criminals who had been released
from prison to "reform themselves" at the front, were attracted
to the job by their virulent nationalist beliefs, by simple sadism, and
by greed. Looting Muslim houses made many of them rich.

Many of the sadistic, high-living, and colorful paramilitary leaders became
celebrities in Serbia. Zeljko Raznatovic, for example, known as Arkan (everyone
knew his Serb Volunteer Guard, by far the strongest and best armed of the
paramilitaries, as Arkan's Tigers), was a famous criminal—a bank robber
by profession who was thought to be wanted in several European countries,
in several of which he had been imprisoned and escaped.

Judah speculates that Arkan's legendary prison escapes have owed much to
his longstanding contacts with agents of an espionage network run out of
the Yugoslav Secretariat for Internal Affairs, for whom he reputedly worked
as an assassin abroad. (His day job was running a pastry shop.) Having lately
married a Serbian pop singer in a huge wedding, Arkan now is a member of
the Yugoslav parliament.

Despite their flamboyance and seeming independence, Arkan's Tigers and the
other paramilitaries—Vojislav Seslj's Chetniks, the White Eagles, the
Yellow Ants (the name is a testament to their prowess at looting)—were
creatures of the Serbian state. As Milos Vasic, an expert on the Yugoslav
military, writes, "They were all organized with the consent of Milosevic's
secret police and armed, commanded, and controlled by its officers."

Though it is unclear how specifically the officers described actual tactics
in the RAM Plan, the similarity of atrocities committed in town after town
lends credence to Beverly Allen's assertion, in Rape Warfare, that
they debated in detail the most effective means of terror. Allen quotes
one document, "a variation of the RAM Plan, written by the army's special
services, including...experts in psychological warfare," that offers
a chilling sociological rationale for the tactics of ethnic cleansing:

Our analysis of the behavior of the Muslim communities demonstrates
that the morale, will, and bellicose nature of their groups can be undermined
only if we aim our action at the point where the religious and social
structure is most fragile. We refer to the women, especially adolescents,
and to the children. Decisive intervention on these social figures
would spread confusion..., thus causing first of all fear and then panic,
leading to a probable retreat from the territories involved in war activity.

This is why Vasic calls the paramilitaries the "psychological weapon
in ethnic cleansing." The men knew that they must be brutal enough,
and inventive enough in their cruelty, that stories of their terror would
quickly spread and in the next village, says Vasic, "no one would wait
for them to come." He estimates that the paramilitaries consisted on
average of "80 percent common criminals and 20 percent fanatical nationalists."[24]

José Maria Mendiluce, an official of
the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, who happened to pass through
Zvornik on April 9, was watching the paramilitaries "mopping up"
the town, when he suddenly realized that "the Belgrade media had been
writing about how there was a plot to kill all Serbs in Zvornik.... This
maneuver always precedes the killing of Muslims." As Michael Sells,
who includes this quotation in his The Bridge Betrayed, comments,

The national mythology, hatred and unfounded charges of actual
genocide in Kosovo and imminent genocide in Bosnia had shaped into a code:
the charge of genocide became a signal to begin genocide.

Army gunners—some of them positioned across the Drina in Serbia itself—targeted
Zvornik and drove its few, lightly armed defenders out in a matter of hours.
Then Vojislav Seslj and his Chetnik paramilitaries moved in.

Mendiluce watched as the soldiers and the paramilitaries did their work:
television—began to broadcast a more hysterical version of Belgrade's
propaganda, claiming that dangerous Muslim extremists were hiding around
and within Prijedor, preparing to seize the town and commit genocide against
the Serbs.

By now it had become quite clear what this accusation heralded. Those few
Muslims and Croats who still had weapons decided to move first. As the UN
investigators describe it:

On 30 May 1992, a group of probably less than 150 armed non-Serbs
had made their way to the Old Town in Prijedor to regain control of the
town.... They were defeated, and the Old Town was razed. In the central
parts of Prijedor..., all non-Serbs were forced to leave their houses
as Serbian military, paramilitary, police and civilians advanced street
by street with tanks and lighter arms. The non-Serbs had been instructed
over the radio to hang a white piece of cloth on their home to signal
surrender.

According to the UN Report, "Hundreds, possibly thousands
were killed...frequently after maltreatment." Those who survived
were divided into two groups: women, children, and the very old were often
simply expelled; as for the men, thousands were sent to Keraterm and Omarska,
the two nearest concentration camps. Although the fighting on May 30 began
a general exodus of non-Serbs—the Muslim population dropped from
nearly fifty thousand in 1991 to barely 6,000 in 1993—it very quickly
became clear that the Serbs were targeting for actual deportation the
elite of the city: political leaders, judges, policemen, academics and
intellectuals, officials who had worked in the public administration,
important business people, and artists. And, after the burning of the
old town, any "other important traces of Muslim and Croatian culture
and religion—mosques and Catholic churches included—were destroyed."

On the morning of May 30, 1992, two heavily armed soldiers came to his
door and summoned him and, within hours, Rezak Hukanovic, a forty-three-year-old
father of two, broadcaster, journalist, and poet, found himself packed
into a bus with scores of other frightened men, bent over, his head between
his knees, peering out of the corner of his eye at the tongues of flame
rising from the Old City of Prijedor. He was on his way to Omarska.

5.

In Washington, intelligence analysts were watching. "The initial
Serb offensive moved an awful lot of people out of where they were living,"
said Jon Western, who was then working analyzing Bosnian war crimes at
the State Department, "and we knew these people were not simply disappearing.
Where were they being taken?"

Officials would soon discover the answer; by late June or early July,
little more than a month after Rezak Hukanovic boarded the bus at Prijedor,
Western and his colleagues had learned of the camps:

We had information about the concentration camps, we were compiling
that information and trying to get a more accurate picture but it was
clear we knew.... To the extent that we could pinpoint and say that there
was a camp here or here, we did that.[24]

The information was passed forward to Secretary of State James Baker and
to senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House. It met with silence.
Western was not surprised; when it came to information about war crimes
in Bosnia, he said, the offices of senior officials were "generally
a black box. We would send things up and nothing would come back. The only
time we would get a response was when the press covered a particular event."

When the inevitable press disclosures came, in early August, the timing
could not have been worse for the Bush administration. Throughout the summer
influential voices demanding that something should be done to halt the carnage
in Bosnia had been growing

I saw lorries full of corpses. Soldiers were dumping dead women,
children and old people onto lorries. I saw four or five lorries full
of corpses. On one bend, my jeep skidded on the blood.[25]

United Nations investigators say Seslj briefed his Chetniks in a local hotel,
reading out a list of the names of local Muslims who were to be killed.
"Milosevic was in total control," Seslj later told an interviewer,
"and the operation was planned...in Belgrade."

The Bosnian Serbs did take part. But the best combat units came
from Serbia. These were special police commandos called Red Berets. They're
from the Secret Service of Serbia. My forces took part, as did others.
We planned the operation very carefully, and everything went exactly according
to plan.[26]

According to the United Nations, some two thousand people from Zvornik remain
unaccounted for. As for the other 47,000 Muslims, they were expelled, many
of them forced onto the roads with only what they wore. Zvornik, which had
a thriving community of Muslims for half a millennium, now has none.

Sometimes the cleansing was carried out more
gradually. Early in 1992, members of a small paramilitary group seized control
of Prijedor's television transmitter, thus ensuring that the town received
only programs from Belgrade—programs which, UN investigators wrote,
"insinuated that non-Serbs wanted war and threatened the Serbs."
Soon Yugoslav National Army troops, fresh from the Croatia war, began arriving
in the Prijedor area. The Army officers demanded that Prijedor's leaders
permit their troops to take up positions around the city, from which they
could control all roads to, and exits from, the district.

It was an ultimatum. The legitimate authorities were invited
for a guided sightseeing tour of two Croatian villages...which had been
destroyed and left uninhabited. The message was that if the ultimatum
was not [accepted], the fate of Prijedor would be the same. ... The ultimatum
was accepted.[27]

With Bosnian Serb troops guarding all roads, Prijedor became isolated. The
Serbs closed down the bus service. They required that people have permits
to visit even nearby villages. They imposed a curfew. The telephones were
often not working.

On April 30, in a swift, well-executed coup d'état, local
Serbs seized control of Prijedor itself. According to the United Nations
investigators, the Serbs had been preparing to seize power for at least
six months, arming themselves with weapons secretly supplied by the Army
and developing their own clandestine "parallel" administrations,
including a "shadow" police force with its own secret service.

Non-Serbs now began to lose their jobs. Policemen and public officials were
the first to be dismissed, but the purge went on until even many manual
workers had been fired. The "shadow" administrations already long
prepared by the Serbs simply took over the empty offices.

The new Serb policemen, often accompanied by paramilitaries, began to pay
visits throughout Prijedor, pounding on the doors of all non-Serbs who held
licenses to own firearms and demanding they turn them in.

Finally, near the end of May, the local press—newspapers, radio, and
television—began to broadcast a more hysterical version of Belgrade's
propaganda, claiming that dangerous Muslim extremists were hiding around
and within Prijedor, preparing to seize the town and commit genocide against
the Serbs.

By now it had become quite clear what this accusation heralded. Those few
Muslims and Croats who still had weapons decided to move first. As the UN
investigators describe it:

On 30 May 1992, a group of probably less than 150 armed non-Serbs
had made their way to the Old Town in Prijedor to regain control of the
town.... They were defeated, and the Old Town was razed. In the central
parts of Prijedor..., all non-Serbs were forced to leave their houses
as Serbian military, paramilitary, police and civilians advanced street
by street with tanks and lighter arms. The non-Serbs had been instructed
over the radio to hang a white piece of cloth on their home to signal
surrender.

According to the UN Report, "Hundreds, possibly thousands
were killed...frequently after maltreatment." Those who survived
were divided into two groups: women, children, and the very old were often
simply expelled; as for the men, thousands were sent to Keraterm and Omarska,
the two nearest concentration camps. Although the fighting on May 30 began
a general exodus of non-Serbs—the Muslim population dropped from
nearly fifty thousand in 1991 to barely 6,000 in 1993—it very quickly
became clear that the Serbs were targeting for actual deportation the
elite of the city: political leaders, judges, policemen, academics and
intellectuals, officials who had worked in the public administration,
important business people, and artists. And, after the burning of the
old town, any "other important traces of Muslim and Croatian culture
and religion—mosques and Catholic churches included—were destroyed."

On the morning of May 30, 1992, two heavily armed soldiers came to his
door and summoned him and, within hours, Rezak Hukanovic, a forty-three-year-old
father of two, broadcaster, journalist, and poet, found himself packed
into a bus with scores of other frightened men, bent over, his head between
his knees, peering out of the corner of his eye at the tongues of flame
rising from the Old City of Prijedor. He was on his way to Omarska.

6.

In Washington, intelligence analysts were watching. "The initial
Serb offensive moved an awful lot of people out of where they were living,"
said Jon Western, who was then working analyzing Bosnian war crimes at
the State Department, "and we knew these people were not simply disappearing.
Where were they being taken?"

Officials would soon discover the answer; by late June or early July,
little more than a month after Rezak Hukanovic boarded the bus at Prijedor,
Western and his colleagues had learned of the camps:

We had information about the concentration camps, we were compiling
that information and trying to get a more accurate picture but it was
clear we knew.... To the extent that we could pinpoint and say that there
was a camp here or here, we did that.[28]

The information was passed forward to Secretary of State James Baker and
to senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House. It met with silence.
Western was not surprised; when it came to information about war crimes
in Bosnia, he said, the offices of senior officials were "generally
a black box. We would send things up and nothing would come back. The only
time we would get a response was when the press covered a particular event."

When the inevitable press disclosures came, in early August, the timing
could not have been worse for the Bush administration. Throughout the summer
influential voices demanding that something should be done to halt the carnage
in Bosnia had been growing louder and President Bush, fighting desperately
to win re-election, had been struggling to defend his government's own passivity.

For their part the Bosnian Serbs, seeing the
dramatic increase of pressure on Bush to intervene, were quick to realize
their blunder. In permitting Western journalists to see the camps, Karadzic
apparently thought they could be duped into believing conditions were not
so bad as the growing rumors seemed to suggest: in his Seasons in Hell,
Ed Vulliamy tells of later learning from a survivor who had been imprisoned
at Omarska during the journalists' visit that "only the fittest"
of prisoners had been displayed. (It is also remotely possible, as Judah
suggests, that Karadzic did not allow himself to learn how dreadful conditions
in the camps were.)

In any event, the Serbs quickly moved to close the most notorious camps.
President Bush's denunciations and demands that the camps be opened to international
inspectors no doubt helped quickly shut the doors of Omarska and some others;
had Bush chosen to reveal the camps and spoken out when he and his officials
had first learned of them the result would have surely been the same—except
a great many prisoners might still be alive.

Closing the camps did not put an end to the controversy over the atrocities
in Bosnia. "They kept saying the war would 'burn itself out,'"
a State Department official told me. "I actually sat in a meeting where
people suggested that what would be needed for the war to 'burn itself out'
would be around 20,000 dead." On August 18, however, Senate investigators
released a detailed report concluding that already in the first four weeks
of the war 35,000 people, almost all Muslim victims of ethnic cleansing,
had been killed. And, throughout the great breadth of their conquered lands,
the Serbs went on applying the proven techniques of ethnic cleansing. They
raped, mutilated, and killed thousands and expelled hundreds of thousands
from their homes; many of these crimes took place virtually before the eyes
of reporters, most of them from the West.

Many press and television commentators, human rights representatives, members
of Congress, leaders of Jewish and Muslim advocacy groups, and others now
brought pressure to bear on the Bush administration to declare that what
was taking place in Bosnia constituted "genocide." A number of
administration officials, particularly lower- and mid-level foreign service
officers with responsibility for Bosnia, also began to promote this cause
within the State Department, believing, as one of them, Paul Williams, then
a lawyer at the Office of European and Canadian Affairs, put it, that "if
the United States identifies what is occurring in Bosnia as genocide, then
it ups the ante, it creates a moral obligation as well as a legal obligation
to take action."[29]

"Genocide" (a word coined in 1944 by the scholar Raphael Lemkin)
was meant to denote not simply murdering an entire people—the object
of the law against it was to prevent the crime, not simply to define legally
the extent of a massacre—but, wrote Lemkin, "a coordinated plan
of different actions aiming at the destructions of different foundations
of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups
themselves." The "actions" Lemkin lists as constituting genocide—"disintegration
of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national
feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the
destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even
the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups"[30] —read like the catalog of ethnic
cleansing.

Lemkin's definition laid the foundation for the United Nations' Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), and it
was according to the terms of this treaty that a growing number of State
Department officials were pressuring their government to define what was
happening in Bosnia. The treaty calls on its signers to undertake "to
prevent and to punish" crimes of genocide. But the declaration would
not necessarily be of "operational importance," as a colleague
told State Department official Richard Johnson, since individual war crimes
"are easier to prove than genocide"; nor would it be a help in
"ending the killing in Bosnia (through a 'negotiated settlement')."

But that was exactly the point: to call ethnic cleansing by its proper name
would be a powerful political act. As Johnson points out in his essay "The
Pinstripe Approach to Genocide" (included in The Conceit of Innocence),
a determination of genocide "would undermine the credibility of Western
policies that rely on...peace talks to reach a 'voluntary settlement' between
'warring factions'—who would now be defined as the perpetrators and
victims of genocide." And if the administration had officially identified
what was happening as genocide, Paul Williams says, it would have created
"a moral imperative. Genocide is a term that is recognized by the American
people. It means something, both to the American people and under international
law."

In the wake of the concentration camp controversy, George Bush and his senior
officials recognized that a determination of genocide would multiply the
pressure to act forcefully in Bosnia—and that was clearly the last
thing they wanted. Having denounced the camps, Bush officials promised to
submit information on war crimes in Bosnia to the United Nations War Crimes
Commission—and assigned one foreign service officer to the task. The
secretary of state, meantime, requested a determination from the Office
of Legal Advisor of whether or not what was going on in Bosnia constituted
genocide, and was told, according to Williams, that "it appeared to
be a simple question: if the atrocities which are occurring in Bosnia continue,
this amounts to genocide." It was unclear, however, whether the lawyers
had enough evidence to trace responsibility directly to Milosevic.

With Governor Clinton strongly denouncing Bush's inaction—shortly after
the election he would declare, in what must have been an irritating echo
of Bush's warning to Saddam Hussein, that "the legitimacy of ethnic
cleansing cannot stand"—General Colin Powell once again went on
the offensive. On October 10, three weeks before the election, General Powell
published his own essay on The New YorkTimes's opinion page,
in which, while offering a strong endorsement of his beleaguered Commander-in-Chief,
he asserted that "Americans know they are getting a hell of a return
on their defense investment."

The reason for our success is that in every instance we have
carefully matched the use of military force to our political objectives.
President Bush, more than any other recent President, understands the
proper use of military force. In every instance, he has made sure that
the objective was clear and that we knew what we were getting into.

Though Powell doesn't mention Vietnam, it is evident his own demons lurk
just beneath the surface:

[Y]ou bet I get nervous when so-called experts suggest that
all we need is a little surgical bombing or a limited attack. When the
desired result isn't obtained, a new set of experts then comes forward
with talk of a little escalation. History has not been kind to this approach.[31]

The American officers would use this tactic, subtly managed, of brandishing
Vietnam in front of policymakers and then the public, to undermine nearly
every proposal for action that the United States might take to influence
the evolving conflict in Bosnia.[32] "The Pentagon's tactic,"
Warren Zimmermann says, "was never to say no, simply to raise objections
which made proposals seem unworkable." And though it is true the officers
"never got very good answers to [their] incessant questioning of what
was the precise military objective and what political end would be served
by achieving it[,]...it is also true that Bosnia proved the United States
incapable of managing a complex war requiring a limited use of force for
limited objectives." Zimmermann, America's "last ambassador to
Yugoslavia," has now left the State Department; four of the young Foreign
Service officers who were fighting for a change in Bosnia policy resigned
in protest.

As for the demands that had risen to a crescendo after the emaciated faces
from Bosnia appeared on American television screens, demands that the administration
do something about this horror, Bush officials devised a novel solution.
They would indeed do something, going so far as to send American troops;
but their mission would be to tend to a different population of emaciated
beings. In deciding to dispatch troops to feed starving Africans, Eagleburger
conceded, "We knew the costs weren't so great and there were some potential
benefits." And as for General Powell, he was said to have predicated
his support for Somalia's Restore Hope on the condition that the United
States "would attempt no such mission in Bosnia."[33]

This is the second in a series of articles.

Notes

[1]
Roy Gutman of Newsday broke the story of the camps in his article
on August 2, 1992; see his collection, A Witness to Genocide (Macmillan,
1993). But it was not until August 6, when Britain's International Television
News (ITN) broadcast the first television pictures from the camps, that
President Bush found himself forced to defend his "standoffish"
policy toward the former Yugoslavia. See the first article in this series,
"The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe," The New York Review,
November 20, 1997.

[2] Primo Levi,
Survival in Auschwitz (Simon and Schuster, 1993), p. 90. Perhaps
it was this apparent absence of mortal fear, recalling the "supposed
fatalism" of the Muslims, that led the SS men to coin the nickname
Musulmen; or it may have been the "swaying motions of the upper part
of the body," brought on by severe muscle atrophy, which the Germans
thought echoed "Islamic prayer rituals." See Wolfgang Sofsky,
The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, translated by William
Templer (1993; reprinted in translation by Princeton University Press, 1997),
p. 329, note 5.

[16] Drawn from an unbroadcast section of an interview with ABC News, "While America Watched: The Bosnia Tragedy," January 1994.

[17] Republished as The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan (Carnegie
Endowment, 1993), p. 151.

[18] Drawn from an unbroadcast section of an
interview with ABC News, "While America Watched: The Bosnia Tragedy,"
January 1994.

[19] See "The Gates of Hell," Program Four (UK TX version) in The Death of Yugoslavia, Brian Lapping and Associates; Laura Silber, consultant.

[21] Testimony of Jerko Doko, The Prosecutor v. Tadic, case IT-94-I-T, June 6, 1996, pp. 1359-1361, in "Testimony Offered to the International Commission for the Former Yugoslavia,"
The Hague, June 6, 1996.

[24] See Milos
Vasic, "The Yugoslav Army and the Post-Yugoslav Armies," in D.A.
Dyker and I. Vejvoda, editors, Yugoslavia and After: A Study in Fragmentation,
Despair and Rebirth (Longman, 1996), p. 134.

[32]A bit less subtly, Dr. Karadzic, the wily
psychiatrist, was playing the same game, proclaiming that if the West attempted
to intervene, "Bosnia will turn into a new Vietnam." Quoted in
Judah, The Serbs, pp. 212-213.